Telecom network vendor Alcatel-Lucent has started trying to sell virtualized residential gateway (vRGW) promising up to 40 percent cut in Opex (operating costs) for telecoms.
A Bell Labs report today said telecom network operators providers can cut operating costs by up to 40 percent by virtualizing functions currently deployed on residential gateways into the network cloud. Bell Labs is part of Alcatel-Lucent.
Enrique Hernandez-Valencia, consulting director, Bell Labs, a part of Alcatel-Lucent, says residential gateways play an important role in connecting home networks to the Internet. The report says vRGW moves functions like IP routing and Network Address Translation (NAT) into the cloud, along with centralized management and control to handle complex issues faced telecoms.
A vRGW can reduce the costs of service fulfillment, assurance and lifecycle management up to 40 percent. Reduction in operating cost and improvement in customer experience are the main benefits of vRGW.
This apart, a virtualized gateway model allows global telecoms to launch new services more rapidly and consistently across the installed base of residential gateway devices.
The telecom analysis report says service fulfillment ensures 7-12 percent cost reduction to global telecoms. A simpler residential gateway, extended auto-installation capabilities and network-based service capabilities lead to faster turning up of upgrades or new services and fewer home visits by technicians to address service activation or upgrade issues. Home visits can represent over 80 percent of service fulfillment cost.
The report said service assurance will ensure 63-67 percent cost reduction to telecoms. Service provider data shows that 30-40 percent of trouble tickets are related to issues deeper in the network. These can be resolved better by virtualizing and centralizing these deeper functions in combination with home device management capabilities.
Life-cycle management ensures approximate 66 percent cost reduction to telecoms. Though life-cycle management costs are relatively small compared to fulfillment and assurance costs, enhanced service velocity and agility improve service innovation, time to market, and revenue.
A virtualized residential gateway delivers structural improvements in customer experience, service velocity and operational agility.
Alcatel-Lucent 7750 SR and the Virtualized Service Router product line support Alcatel-Lucent’s virtualized residential gateway solution. Alcatel-Lucent will be adding more capabilities to its vRGW solution in the first half of 2016.
“As we enter the age of the Gigabit home, and as more personal computers, consumer devices and user gadgets get connected – the digital home network is getting more complex. While costs and complexity are increasing, subscriber growth is stagnating, and average revenue per user is declining steadily,” said Sri Reddy, vice president and general manager, IP Routing & Software, Alcatel-Lucent.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
